Erik Dietman

As a multidisciplinary artist, Erik Dietman deliberately kept himself on the margins of the artistic movements of his time, despite having some affinities with them. A free-thinker, it is was an inde-pendent artist that he created a corpus of personal works that oscillate between reality and poetry. His criticism of the avant-gardes is tinged with subtle humour. The drawings, the assemblages, the sculptures, look like puzzles giving a material existence to the word. His three-dimensional vocabu-lary, ranging from composite assemblies to monumental bronzes, combines narration with figuration and is oriented towards the creation of a sort of visual spoonerism. His art has naturally imposed itself as one of the most original contributions to sculpture of the 20th century.

"For me, it is the world that is a sculpture, and in the world there are words that are insufficient and which I help as I can by making objects for them".
Erik Dietman

Erik Dietman was born in 1937 in Jönköping, Sweden. He died on 28 June, 2002, in Paris.
Expelled from his lycée at the age of thirteen for having "urinated on the Swedish flag", he attended a training course to become a goldsmith (1951-1952), and in 1953 had a life-changing meeting with Oyvind Falhström who was on the point of publishing his manifesto on concrete poetry.

In his early days, he used rébus (rejects) as much as rebus, diversion as much as recovery, and played with words and everyday objects. He devoured James Joyce's Ulysses, which perfectly tied in with his need to re-read the world. But he had two tutelary figures (not claimed): Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp. A conscientious objector, Erik Dietman left Sweden and arrived in France in 1959 where he met the supporters of the Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus whose work was close in intent to his own. Then he became friends with Daniel Spoerri and Robert Filliou. However, Dietman was never a member of these movements. "More than two already makes an army", he used to quip to defend his independence. His individualistic attitude allowed him a disrespectful freedom from successive fashions.

Even though he did not join any of these groups, he did work and maintain very close friendships with some members of Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme. He participated with the latter at the "Salon des Comparaisons" in 1965 and 1966. His friend, with whom to share his joie de vivre, humour and derision, was Roland Topor, whom he met in 1963.
As early as 1962, Erik Dietman aroused great interest with his Objects pansés, Objects pensés. He would cover all kinds of objects with the aid of sticking plaster, an easily recognisable strip of adhesive tissue of a pink flesh colour. This bandage established a boundary between two realities, one of a physical nature and the other of a mental nature. For Dietman, this wrapping hid the better to reveal because the plaster both isolates the object from the environment and reveals its shape. It does not hide things but unites them, increasing their reality while maintaining their integrity. The wrapping gives a singularity to the shape of the object, eliminates its anecdotal side and stresses its details. It enables one to see it better by outlining the contours.

Erik Dietman then "bandaged" wood and cardboard, framed photographs, hid and masked words and sentences. The motley objects he manufactured are, in general, given names with double meanings, which thus gave them a new meaning. With this period of Sparadraps (or "poor man's bronzes"), Erik Dietman became, until 1967, the "king of sticking plaster", as he defined himself in a posture of self-deprecation.

From 1966, he began Le Grand Livre Sterling, Rébus sur les vicissitudes d'une vie, a vast rebus consisting of objects, photographs and drawings, which he finished in 1976. The artist then made collages and assemblies with a variety of materials: he made several works in bread such as Pain, consisting of the word pain (intended also in the English meaning of the word), baked in real bread and Sac en pain, as well as mobiles. This was a period of intense work marked by a succession of numerous exhibitions in Europe.
From 1970, he removed an "n" from the end of his name and signed himself Dietman. In the 1970s, his work diversified and when he made "poem-paintings", it was an astonishing mixture of painting, knick-knacks and utensils.
In 1975, he returned to France after several months abroad and settled in the Var. In the same year, the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris presented his first retrospective in France, "Vingt années de sueur", which was repeated the following year at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

In 1977, Denmark awarded him his first public commission and Dietman took part in the "l'Ecole de Nice" exhibition on the occasion of the opening of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. From the 1980s, he began his first modelings and these marked a turning point in his work. He embarked on an intense production of drawings and sculptures, impregnated with an ironic poetry and whose titles are full of puns. Bronze, marble, ceramics and glass became the materials used for works that were sometimes monumental, in which the themes of death and humour are very recurrent. In the 1980s, he also produced his Polaroïdioties (Polaroids of "everything and nothing") which he continued until 1993.
In 1989, he won the Grand Prix national de sculpture in France and in 1990 in Sweden, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Award in Stockholm.

From the 1990s, he began to show a more restless face, haunted by the obsession with creation. He was also a socially engaged individual, as witnessed by some works (Kosovo or Voyage organisé sur l'Adriatique).
One of Erik Dietman's major works, which can be seen in the Tuileries gardens in Paris, is titled L'Ami de personne and dates from 2000. It is a monumental bronze sculpture, a giant figure, who seems to reach out for a small chair.
At the end of his life Erik Dietman agreed to be a professor of sculpture at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the Stockholm Academy of Arts to strive to communicate to his pupils his enthusiasm and need to know the history of art and pass on his taste for drawing, to create with his hands.

Erik Dietman has always been marginal, marginal and solitary. He never liked, much less belonged to any group: "Two or three people are already a small army". Since his childhood, he knew that he was an artist and that art would be his life.
He arrived in Paris in 1959 at the age of 22, speaking neither French nor really English. Anti-violence, he left his native Sweden to avoid military service and the prison to which his refusal to bear arms would have led. He intended to go to the United States but the vagaries of travel without money led him to Paris where he immediately met Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri, forming a firm friendship with them.
Self-taught and curious, he read a great deal, especially poetry. This love of poetry permeated him, but the objects accompanied or replaced the words he used to twist in Swedish, English or French, which he came to learn better and better. Thus it was that he defined himself a failed poet: Ah! were it enough to have need only of a notebook in the pocket and nothing else apart from a pencil...
In the early 1960s, he shared this thought which from Pop Art to Nouveau Réalisme could delineate a new approach to the use of objects in art, aka the art object. He adhered to his notion: as early as 1960 he began to "bandage" everyday objects in his life (Tableau malade, 1960), a practice he continued until 1965-66, and then he quickly turned this budding success into an opportunity for self-derision: he became the ex-king of sticking plaster.
This was followed by a series of works in which humour gained an increasingly important place in the midst of commentaries about art, politics and literature (Mais,1968 or Reflections sur Pop Art, 1969), in which he shared the creation with his alter egos, Outil O'Tool, Penand Pencil and F.T. Bidlake.

From an early age, Erik Dietman evinced an interest in art: "As far back as I can remember, I drew. I have always drawn, always, and I had only one dream in my head: to become an artist. I never wanted to be a train driver or station master - never - only an artist . I never thought of anything else".
In 1959, Erik Dietman, unable at the time to speak French, arrived in Paris, met Robert Filliou and Daniel Spoerri..., and was present at the birth of Nouveau Réalisme and the emergence of Fluxus. He frequented their members but, younger and too individualistic, he was at no time tempted to join. Later, he said about groups: "Two is already a small army".
"Ses objets pensés" earned him a reputation, but to avoid the image of the sticking plaster king that was already sticking to him a little too much, he self-proclaimed himself the former king of sticking plaster and moved away from objects to take refuge in words, languages (he could now speak English and French), images, collages, even painting, and finally in the early 1980s, sculpture in bronze, marble, metal and even, a little later, in glass or ceramics. Large exhibitions and public commissions began to follow regularly. He travelled a lot, and always drew. "Drawing is my daily jogging", he claimed. In the 1990s, he felt ready for the Olympics and in parallel with all the rest, undertook a series of large formats that punctuated his work until his death. There too, fantasy, poetry, sadness, humour and ferocity blended because all of this was his life, his creation: "Without art, I am nothing, I am dead, I am nothing".

It is hardly enough to say that Erik Dietman is an unclassifiable and never pigeonholed artist, extremely classy, insolent, never sad, elusive, rebellious, inveterate. In fact, Erik Dietman discouraged definitions: to try to circumscribe him, one is condemned to euphemism. He was almost the only one who succeeded in defining himself, because he made things simple through matter: Erik Dietman, major artist. This, when all is said and done (let's overlook his quirikiness), is what we can venture that is least inaccurate about the man.
His work, on the other hand, can be approached by attempts at contextualization, but we must be aware that using these markers we will always remain at a distance: Erik Dietman, great artist, knew Fluxus closely and met the new realists before they were even called that. He had an extraordinary flair, and an unfailing talent for friendship. That said, even though he was once "King of sticking plaster", never in his life did he ever adhere to any movement, except of course that of the dishes from kitchen to table.
Art, moreover, his daily sporty and digestive practice, was never really distinguished by him from what goes on in the kitchen, and the expression "to nourish" should be reserved personally for him. The only real difference is that Erik Dietman's works required a longer preparation than most known recipes: between one and four years on average. The resemblance, on the other hand, lies in the preponderance of language. Like a gastronomic imagination, the composition of his works - far more complex than it seems - stems from the omnipresence of language. His work, in his own eyes, was always written before it was drawn or carved.

Texts produced by Galerie Papillon

Nobody knows exactly how many languages he spoke, but the overwhelming puns that brightened his drawings and the captions of his catalogues always associated several. In the same way, whatever their material and format, the motifs of his works require a thorough examination to discover to what extent they are inhabited, and even overcrowded, with characters and trickeries.
We will see the answers in this latest (of how many?) personal exhibition of pieces rarely shown to date: we will especially notice the works in bronzes that are so different that each seems to reject the next as being bronze.
The Paysage Normand, a giant "bronzai" with green patina, was made using an almost primitive method of bronze casting: Erik Dietman poured the molten metal in sand, and the delicate and almost floral grooves that were the result are the trace of a random physics. The Phare instead combined iron with bronze, and behind an unassuming title and appearance concealed a thicket of meanings similar to that of the drawings. Assembly and composition faithfully reflect the familiar details of a domestic world that Erik Dietman returned to the wild. Finally, the Proverbe turc, an environmental installation of 40 pairs of bronze shoes, reflects its mystery in the warm, leather-coloured patina.

Just before the birth of God, his elder brother by a few thousand years, was already working creatively. He was trying to make "things" to break the sadness and loneliness of heaven. It was a kind of self-therapy, a way of working a bit like that of good artists today. His idea was, according to some reconstructions based on the latest excavations, to create two "things" without any link between them a priori but which in the end turned out to have some. Our research has led us to classify the set of objects found into two categories, in like manner to separating nuts from bolts. Indeed, nuts and bolts have no real link between them but if one wants, one can join them together and take them apart; ie. screw them or unscrew them...

Let us return to the young god, doubtless more skilled than his brother, but above all an unforgivable arriviste, a kind of Mac Giver. He stole the idea of his elder brother and started secretly to work on his first attempts of Adam. When his brother, the real artist and humanist, discovered the worldly and mannerist moulds of his younger brother, he withdrew with his creations to a black cloud and died of dehydration before falling as rain on the earth... The first find dates from last year: we do not yet have really satisfactory results but with the help of the archaeologist Moïse Smileman and Dr. Von Oben we will soon be able to provide documents that will revolutionise our era!

1967La dernière exposition d'Erik Dietmann, Hedenius Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden
The artist sends to all avant-garde film festivals copies of Backpedalling does not mean driving a machine backwards, shot with F.T . Bidlake between 1958 and 1963 but he locks the copies in a strong-box close to each projection room without ever showing the film